"It's one of the biggest days in the history of the web," CERN web manager Luke Noyes said of the historic day 20 years ago.

"CERN's gesture of giving away the web for free was what made it just explode."

The site, which described the web as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative", has long been dormant but CERN has now begun recreating the page.

Mr Noyes says the project will allow future generations to understand the origin and importance of the web and its impact on modern life

"We're going to put these things back in place, so that a web developer or someone who's interested 100 years from now can read the first documentation that came out from the world wide web team," he said.